One of my favourite games of all time would have to be the sims.
It started when I was about eight. While my mom was at work i basically lived at my basbysitter’s house. Rose (babysitter) had three teenaged children who are like my siblings, so when they would play on the computer, I would be playing with the spare controller or keyboard pretending that I was doing something. One of the games was the sims. To my 8 year old mind this was like a virtual doll house, i quickly became enamored.

The player must make decisions about time spent in personal development, such as exercise, reading, creativity, and logic, by adding activities to the daily agenda of the Sims. Daily need fulfillment must also be scheduled, such as personal hygiene, eating, and sleeping. If the simulated humans do not perform need fulfillment, they suffer consequences. For example, if they do not eat, they will die of starvation. If they do not go to the bathroom, they will wet themselves. If they do not have fun, they become depressed, and unwilling to do things. When Sims have low motives they are more likely to be nasty to other Sim characters by insulting them, slapping them and even attacking them.

Financial health is simulated by the need to send the Sims to find jobs, go to work, pay bills, and take advantage of personal development and social contacts to advance in their jobs.

Then when I was around 12, the sims 2 came out, this was exciting because now the children could grow up! You could leave you house and go to places in the community! you could customize how your sims looked! and their genetics would be passed on to their children. Unlike the original Sims, where you could spend forever raising their skills, the aging system in The Sims 2imposes a time limit on this before your Sims die.

The main aim of the game is to lead a Sim from the start of life to death. Sims will need to build up skills and relationships with other Sims, so that he/she can be successful in their career. A player will also need to make sure a Sim is happy and well by fulfilling wants (including lifetime wants, avoiding fears, and fulfilling motives).

Sims’ personalities are also given an overhaul with each Sim having an Aspiration, Wants, and Fears.

The Sims 2 shipped with 3 premade neighborhoods. Pleasantview is a continuation of the original Sims storyline 25 years later. The new neighborhoods are Strangetown, a desert landscape with paranormal occurrences, and Veronaville, which is based on several plays by Shakespeare. Granted some of the expansion packs didn’t upgrade, for instance there is no making magic but it was a small price to pay for a continuing generation.

The people at EA though, well some how they were able to think of improvements. And out of that came The Sims 3. Seamless neighbourhoods were the big sell here, you were able to walk around the entire community rather than pick a lot to load. And you are able to customize the colours and patterns of nearly everything! Which sort of makes up for the loss of some cool objects like the spiral staircase. With this came a more quest style game where your sims are given opportunities and wants. They can also find things around the town. The expansion packs were pretty cool too. This game was definitely more goal oriented than it’s precedors. While the others were more like, as i said before, a virtual doll house, this one felt like you could win.

EA games then decided to go back in time, now that they had the tech for seamless quest based games, they produced, The Sims Medieval! As it was half price (sale lasts until May 6th) I decided to buy it. It took three hours to download and you can only play that version if you’re connected to te internet, so if you are thinking of getting it i suggest ordering the hard copy. So far the game is pretty fun and there is definitely a lot of creative fodder to burn up in my quest for the ultimate kingdom, my only complaint right now is that you can’t save while the tutorial is running, and it runs whenever you open a new game. The tutorial runs until you finish the first quest but still it takes about an hour with it pausing all over the place to tell you what to do.

– Generations (Basically everything they should have had in the original release of TS3) Additions: new playground equipment, new career, and new traits. Features: pranks, midlife crisis, body hair, new types of celebrations (i.e. birthday/teen/bachelor parties, weddings), memories, graduation ceremonies, imaginative play, spiral staircases, water slides. Imaginary Friends

– Much different gameplay than the previous games, you controll a kingdom and each character is like an account in an MMORPG but without the load times in between. Read up on it here http://sims.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sims_Medieval

– You play as the watcher AKA God because people are dumb and in order for them to thrive you need to have a little control over them <- summary of opening. This is the only opening of the sims so far that i thought has been entertaining.